You could have solved this issue. Your coding fingers turned into complaining fingers. If you really had a problem, you should have opened a PR with a license instead of demanding that OP do it on your timeline.
"Many hours later" is a great way to make it sound like a lot of time passed, but the creator said less than 24 hours ago they were open to adding a license and then several users accused him of essentially kicking puppies to death because it wasn't done yet.
He expressed anxiety and unfamiliarity with adding a license he didn't understand. Not to mention multiple users started arguing over the best license, further highlighting why he shouldn't just trust random internet comments and actually look into it. You're going to harass him for it? Do you own his time for the next week because he made a post on HN? Because that attitude is way more harmful to OSS than what you're up in arms about.
Furthermore, this is colloquially open-source to most people, and you're hung up on semantics. Anybody that needs to care about a license can look and see if one is there. If it's so simple to understand a license and add it to your project in such a short span of time, surely it's simple to check for the existence of one in the first place.
(It's kinda weird, because to make a PR, I had to make a fork, and then I added the licence to my fork, even though I'm not allowed to pick the licence, but )
They went with a more open license. Try to do better next time with your license choices. GNU is not nearly as open as the "DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO PUBLIC LICENSE."
Just FWI, it's not illegal to add an incorrect license to a repository you don't have the rights to. It's simply a lie. The copyright notice is just a statement from the author, it doesn't per se define the terms under which the project is distributed. What defines them is the fact that it's the author who put the file there.
